TED Talk Thursday: Tony Robbins Discusses Human Motivation

What motivates you? What’s your internal drive? What shapes you to contribute to society?

That’s what Tony Robbins, a world-renowned life coach, challenges us to consider in our daily lives.

According to Robbins, everyone has dreams and ambitions, but learning how to make them happen is a different story. We must all learn how to find fulfillment each day, but to do so is an art and it starts with appreciation.

In order to understand how to find fulfillment, we must begin by discovering what shapes us, and that starts with finding a focus, giving it meaning and putting emotion behind it, and then acting on that emotion.

“If decisions shape destiny, what determines it is three decisions,” Robbins said. “What will you focus on? You have to decide what you're going to focus on, consciously or unconsciously. The minute you decide to focus, you must give it a meaning, and that meaning produces emotion. Is this the end or the beginning? … An emotion creates what we're going to do, or the action.”

Essentially, finding meaning boils down to appreciation and reshaping the way we think.

Robbins mentioned that there are 6,000 words in the English language depicting emotion, but if we were each asked to keep a log of how we feel through the course of a week, the average person would only use 12 words—half of the terms would be negative.

Lastly, Robbins urges that we all look deep inside ourselves and explore what motivates us in life.

“[Explore] the needs, the beliefs, the emotions that are controlling you, for two reasons: so there's more of you to give, and achieve, too, but I mean give, because that's what's going to fill you up. And secondly, so you can appreciate –not just understand, that's intellectual, that's the mind, but appreciate what's driving other people. It's the only way our world's going to change,” he said.

Click here to watch the full video.